In order to have a performatic Essbase cube, we must keep vigilance and follow up its growth and its data movements so we can distribute caches and adjust the database parameters accordingly. But this is a very difficult task to achieve, since Essbase statistics are not temporal and only tell you the cube statistics is in that specific time frame.

This session will present how ODI can be used to create a historical statistical DW containing Essbase cube’s information and how to identify trends and patterns, giving us the ability for programmatically tune our Essbase databases automatically.

EPM environments are generally supported by a Data Warehouse; however, we often see that those DWs are not optimized for the EPM tools. During the years, we have witnessed that modeling a DW thinking about the EPM tools may greatly increase the overall architecture performance.

The most common situation found in several projects is that the people who develop the data warehouse do not have a great knowledge about EPM tools and vice-versa. This may create a big gap between those two concepts which may severally impact performance.

This session will show a lot of techniques to model the right Data Warehouse for EPM tools. We will discuss how to improve performance using partitioned tables, create hierarchical queries with “Connect by Prior”, the correct way to use multi-period tables for block data load using Pivot/Unpivot and more. And if you want to go ever further, we will show you how to leverage all those techniques using ODI, which will create the perfect mix to perform any process between your DW and EPM environments.

These presentations you can expect a lot of technical content, some very good tips and some very good ideas to improve your EPM environment!

Also I’ll be graduating in this year leadership program and this year we’ll be all over the place with the K-Team, a special team created to make the newcomers fell more welcome and help them to get the most of the kscope.

Also Rodrigo will be at Tuesday Lunch and Learn for the EPM Data Integration track on Cibolo 2/3/4.

And of course we will be around having fun an gathering new ideas for the next year!!!

A standard Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE) reporting application can hold more or less 1,200 users. This may be a reasonable number of users for the majority of the companies out there, but what happens when an IT leader like Dell decides to acquire another IT giant like EMC and all of their combined 140,000-plus users need to have access to an HR OBIEE instance? What does that setup looks like? What kind of architecture do we need to have to support those users in a fast and reliable way?
This session shows the complexity of Dell’s OBIEE environment, describing all processes and steps performed to create such environment, meeting the most varied needs from business demands and L2 support, always aiming to improve environment stability. This architecture relies on a range of different technologies to support that huge amount of end users such as LDAP & SSL, Kerberos, SSO, SSL, BigIP, Shared Folders using NAS, Weblogic running into a cluster within #4 application servers.
If the challenge was not hard enough already, all of this setup also needed to consider Dell’s legacy OBIEE upgrade from v11.1.1.6.9 to v11.1.1.7.160119, so we will explain what were the pain points, considerations and orchestration needed to do all of this in parallel.

I just finished a very exciting project in Brazil and I would like to share how we put everything together for a 100% cloud solution that includes PBCS, BICS, DBCS and ODI. Yes ODI and still 100% cloud.

Now you would be thinking, how could be 100% cloud if ODI isn’t cloud yet? Well, it can be!

This client doesn’t have a big IT infrastructure, in fact, almost all client’ databases are supported and hosted by providers, but still, the client has the rights to have a good forecast and BI tool with a strong ETL process behind it right?

Thanks to the cloud solutions, we don’t need to worry about infrastructure anymore (or almost), the only problem is… ODI.

We still don’t have a KM for cloud services, or a cloud version of ODI, them basically we can’t use ODI to integrate could tools….

Or can we? Yes we can 🙂

The design is simple:

PBCS: Basically we’ll work in the same way we would if it was just it.

BICS: Same thing here, but instead of use the database that comes with BICS, we need to contract a DBCS as well and point the DW schema to it.

DBCS: here’s the trick. Oracle’s DBCS is not else then a Linux machine hosted in a server. That means, we can install other things in the server, other things like ODI and VPN’s.

ODI: we just need to install it in the same way we would do in an on premise environment, including the agent.

VPN’s: the final touch, we just need to create VPN’s between the DBCS and the client DB’s, this way ODI will have access to everything it needs.

Yes you read it right, we can install ODI in the DBCS, and that makes ODI a “cloud” solution.

The solution looks like this:

BICS: It’ll read directly from his DW schema in the DBCS.

PBCS: There’re no direct integration between the PBCS and DBCS (where the ODI Agent is installed), but I found it a lot better and easy to integrate them using EPM Automate.

EPM Automate: With EPM Automate we can do anything we want, extract data and metadata, load data and metadata, execute BR and more. For now the easiest way to go is create a script and call it from ODI, passing anything you need to it.

VPN’s: For each server we need to integrate we’ll need one VPN created. With the VPN between the DBCS and the hosts working, use ODI is extremely strait forward, we just need to create the topology as always, revert anything we need and work in the interfaces.

And that’s it. With this design you can have everything in the cloud and still have your ODI behind scenes! By the way, you can exactly the same thing with ODI on premise and as a bonus you can get rid of all VPN’s.

In another post I’ll give more detail about the integration between ODI and PBCS using EPM Automate, but I can say, it works extremely well and as far I know is a lot easier than FDMEE (at least for me).

In a fast-moving business environment, finance leaders are successfully leveraging technology advancements to transform their finance organizations and generate value for the business.
Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) applications are an integrated, modular suite that supports a broad range of strategic and financial performance management tools that help business to unlock their potential.

Dell’s global financial environment contains over 10,000 users around the world and relies on a range of EPM tools such as Hyperion Planning, Essbase, Smart View, DRM, and ODI to meet its needs.

This session shows the complexity of this environment, describing all relationships between those tools, the techniques used to maintain such a large environment in sync, and meeting the most varied needs from the different business and laws around the world to create a complete and powerful business decision engine that takes Dell to the next level.

Hi guys how are you? It has been a long time since last time I wrote something but it was for a good reason! We were working in our two Kscope sessions! Yes, this year we will have 2 sessions and I think they will be great!

Anyway, let us get to the point!

Today I want to talk about something that should be very simple to do it but in the end, it is a nightmare…. Zip a file in a remote server…

A little bit of context! I was working in a backup interface for one client and, because their cubes are very big, I was trying to improve the performance as much as I can.

Part of the backup was to copy the .ind and .pag files and the data extract files as well. For an app we are talking in 30 gb of .pag and 40 gb of data extract files.

Their ODI infrastructure is like this:

Basically I need to extract/copy data from Essbase server to the disaster recovery server (DR Server). Nothing special here. The problem is, because the size of the files I wanted to Zip the files first and then send it to the DR server.

If you use the ODI tools to Zip the file, what it does is bring all the files to the ODI Agent server, zip everything and the send it back. I really do not want all this traffic in the network and all the time lost in this process (also, the agent server is a LOT less powerful then the Essbase server).

Then I start to research how I could do that (and thank you my colleague and friend Luis Fernando Cairo that help me a lot doing a lot of tests on this)

First of all we have three main options here:

Create a .bat file and run it remotely: I did not like it because I do not want a lot of .bats all over the places

Use windows invoke command: I need a program in the server like 7 zip or so and I don’t have access to install freely and I do not want to install zip’s program all over the places too

Use Psexec to execute a program in the server: Same as the previous one.

Ok, I figure out that in the end I’ll need to create/install something in the server… and I rate it. Well, let’s at least optimize the problem right!

Then I was thinking, what I have in common in all Hyperion servers? The answer is JAVA.

Then I thought, I can use the JAR command to zip a file:

jar cfM file.zip *.pag *.ind

Where:

c: Creates a new archive file named jarfile (if f is specified) or to standard output (if f and jarfile are omitted). Add to it the files and directories specified by inputfiles.

f: Specifies the file jarfile to be created (c), updated (u), extracted (x), indexed (i), or viewed (t). The -f option and filename jarfile are a pair — if present, they must both appear. Omitting f and jarfile accepts a “jar file” from standard input (for x and t) or sends the “jar file” to standard output (for c and u).

M: Do not create a manifest file entry (for c and u), or delete a manifest file entry if one exists (for u).

Humm, things start to looks better. Now I had to decide if I would use the Invoke command or Psexec.

I started trying the Invoke command, but after sometime I figure out that I can’t execute the jar command using invoke.

Then my last alternative was Psexec.

The good thing about it is that is a zip file that you need just to unzip in the agent server, set it in the Environment Variables (PATH) and you are good to go.

It works amazingly.

You can run anything remotely with this and it’s a centralized solution and non-invasive as well (what I liked).

Today I want to talk about the new version of Calculation manager (11.1.2.4). I know that it is out for a while now but still I think it has some cool features that are not explored.

In all Planning project, sooner or later, we come to a time that we need to create a currency conversion Rule (at least I like to create a custom Rule for performance reasons). Also some companies uses a lot of currencies.

Before continue I need to say that in our case I find out that less code is equal a less performance. What I mean by that is that for the forecast horizon range period for example, instead of use “IF” and test my 15/18 months horizon I triplicate the code using “FIX” and using “SET EMPTYMEMBERSETS ON ;”.

This set command ignores the “FIX” if it returns an empty set. This approach increases the performance a lot, some times more than 8 times (In this currency example, if I ran it at channel level with “IF”, toke 8 hours, with “FIX” takes 1 hours).

Ok that means I rarely use “IF” in my Rules.

Well, you can already imagine the size and row boring and prone error is the Rules if I use only “FIX” right? However, with the “Template” feature in calcmanager and the ability to call any template or rule using a script this nightmare turns in to a dream!

Let us see how it works!

A Currency conversion for forecast applications normally has two parts:

First parts is a period range part.

Second part is the currency conversion itself.

With calcmanager, we can create two template, one for the period and the other for call the currency conversion part.

Then for the Currency conversion calculation, I create a simple core template with just a formula and a script on it:

The “dtp_Quote_UDA” is a DTP (design time prompt) variable with a function that will insert double quotes in every value that comes from the “dtp_UDA” DTP variable (this will be used to get values from the outside template), this way we can have use just one variable to do two papers, currency name and UDA value. The code is:

@QUOTE([dtp_UDA])

The inside the Currency calculation script we will have:

As we can see inside the script, I used the “dtp_Quote_UDA” as well the “dtp_UDA”. This simplify the amount of parameters I need to pass and the maintenance as well. Let’s think, we need the same information, one with double quotes, for the UDA values and other without quotes, for the Rate name.

With this technic we need to pass just once the value, let’s say BRL, and in the code Calcmanager will replace before the execution in all places, and we’ll have @UDA(Entity,”BRL”) as well HSP_Rate_BRL.

This is awesome because now I have just 8 line of code that will be transformed in any amount of times I want. The best thing is, or everything is right or everything is wrong J

Because calcmanger now we have a layer between the code written and the code generated, and this is pretty cool because opens a huge windows for creativity. You can even generate the entire code dynamically.

Ok, the next step is to loop this template once for each currency we have. For this, I created another template. This one will be used for the Forecast horizon period range as well for loop the currencies.

Again, the code is pretty simple, just two fixes and one script.

For the “Period FIX” we use two DTP variable to get the value of Year and period from the outside rule ([dtp_Period] and [dtp_Year]).

The product fix is just something related with our architecture and we do not need to bother about it.

Now the “Loop Currency” is a script that will call N number of times our first template. How can we do that with a script?

Basically every time you drag and drop a template inside a rule or to another template behind the graphic design calcmanager generate a command line. This code exists thanks to its API, and you can use it to manipulate and generate almost any kind of code inside calcmanger.

As we can see, inside the script we have a “Fix” for the USD currency, (that is the only different conversion) and one row for each currency.

Each row is calling a template “%Template(name:=Currency Conversion – 2 – UDA Loop” from an application “application:=”WWOPS””, a plan type, “plantype:=”Pnl””, and is passing two DTS values, one for the UDA and other for the Entity, “dtps:=(“dtp_UDA”:=[[AED]],”dtp_Entity:=[[dtp_Entity]])”.

As you can see, you can pass a DTP variable using the variable itself (dtp_Entity:=[[dtp_Entity]]).

If you want to create this API code and don’t know how to write the right syntax you can just drag your template to a rule/template, set everything and change your view to “Edit Script” or “View Script”.

Now we just need to create the rule that will call this template for the three range of periods we have:

Again a simple design with a small amount of components. Here we have our SET commands, a main fix and the three templates, each one calling the previous template for a different period of range.

The final result is a Rule with 1213 rows generated from a 8 rows template. This is the magic of calcmanager and templates. You can simplify everything, you can create dynamic aggregations, that will change depending of the application and cube, you can create codes that changes depending of the member that is coming from the forms, everything with small set of code that is reusable anytime we want!

…….

A dynamic way to build a currency rule in calcmanager. A lot faster to build and a lot easier to maintain, since if a new currency start to be used you just need to copy and paste one line in “Currency Loop” script, change the currency and it’s done.

Build Rules using templates looks more work and some time a little bit complicate but I remember well how much time I expend changing BRs and I can guarantee that this way is much faster and easier to develop and mainly to maintain.

In the end we just create a Rule and two templates that contains just one core calculation, in my case a script calling 47 times this core, some fixes, and that’s all. It was less than 60 rows of written code to generate 1213 rows. Pretty good for me 🙂

Hope you guys enjoy and I wish a happy new year for all and you dears ones.

Hi guys, hope everyone is well. Today I want to talk a little bit about an OBIEE trick (doesn’t looks like but I work with that too :)).

Other day I was in a client that was complaining about a performance issue in a Condition validation in a Dashboard.

Basically they have a Dashboard with a prompt and a condition to select the Analysis that they want to show in the dashboard.

To build that they used the normal approach:

Create a Variable prompt:

Then they created 6 analysis and a Dummy column in each analysis to be used as prompt filter:

In this dummy column they created a “CASE” formula getting the return of the presentation variable of the prompt and transforming it in a 0 or 1 (false or true).

After create the dummy column they used it in the filter like this:

Finally, they put all together in the dashboard and used the condition to show only the analysis that has more than 0 rows:

The trick here is simple, when the “Analysis 1” is selected it will return “Analysis 1” in the “varId” presentation variable. The Case in the analysis will transform this value in 0 or 1 and it will make one Analysis return rows and the other returns none.

The “Condition” in the dashboard will count the amount of rows of each report and will show the report that have more than ZERO rows.

And here’s where my trick is handy. What is the problem with this approach? Obiee must count all the rows that return in all analysis before show it in the screen.

In my client case, they have 6 huge Analysis in this prompt and the time to count the rows in any of the six analysis was bigger than show in the screen the report itself (Remember, Obiee default limit is 25 rows but when you count something it’ll count all the rows that returns not only the 25). (Also I do not know about other clients but all my clients loves to have huge list reports that the ERP does not provides in OBIEE, and it’s not only Brazilian clients, US clients too).

Anyway, this process took a lot longer than I like it, then I created a simple and powerful work around to this.

The idea here is almost the same but with some little differences. First of all we don’t need that dummy column and the filter anymore in the Analysis then let’s remove then:

Now we will create a new analysis. This analysis will be create using a “Direct database Request”.

The analysis is simple. We will do a query against the dual table using “CONNECT BY“, “LEVEL” and the return of the presentation variable from the prompt:

Well, what the connect by and the level does. Basically it returns the amount of lines that we want to, for example:

In this example, I put 4 in the “LEVEL” and it returns 4 rows, if I put 6 there it’ll return 6 rows and so one. This is an awesome way to generate data without a PL.

Ok now we need to replace the 4 by the “varId” from our Prompt and we’ll have something like this:

Now, with this, if the prompt returns “Analysis 1” this query will return 1 row, if it returns “Analysis 2” the query will return 2 rows as we can see here:

The final touch. We need only to change our condition and make use of our sub query. Because OBIEE condition only counts the amount of rows from an analysis I had to create this “CONNECT BY LEVEL” clause. It was the only one to control the amount of rows depending of the prompt.

With this OBIEE will, instead of count an entire analysis, it will count only a very small and limited amount of rows, and we need only to say that the “Analysis 1” will appears if the amount of rows is 1 and the “Analysis 2” will appears if the amount of rows is 2 and so one:

And the result is:

This is a very simple but powerful, reliable and faster way to implement an Analysis prompt in OBIEE, and the best part is that if you do not have it yet you can create it without the need of change your current analysis.